This has been broken in the most recent nightly builds. I think I’ll wait till things settle down before I try and figure out how to do it again.

So keeping track of the various comments I leave on blogs around the web has always been a challenge. For awhile I tried using the service coComment but It’s hard to believe how astonishingly bad supposedly professional web developers can be at creating simple javascript tools. I could either install their bloated extension that would run their code on every webpage I visited (which I think made a call back to coComment on any page that looked like it might be a blog) or run a crappy bookmarklet that didn’t work very well. I’m sure the service works for some people but it’s yet another example of a bad system created because the authors thought everyone would want to use it in exactly one way (or should use it that way). I’m much happier with co.mments but sometimes I just want to remember a page/post not place it in the list of discussions I’m following, keep track of several types of pages (discussions and neat products) or I just want these links to be conveniently accessible from my toolbar.

With Firefox 3′s places support I’ve finally found a great solution. Say I want a folder that lists the 15 most recent pages I bookmarked with the tag ‘comments’. First I need to have bookmarked at least one page with that tag at which point I find the id of the folder “comments” under the tag folder. I did this by using the sqlite manager plugin for firefox and opening the places.sqlite database in my profile folder. (I think it may also be possible to do this by opening bookmarks.postplaces.html). You’ll know that you’ve found the right entry if it has the same name as the tag you’re interested in and has a parent of 4 (it’s in the tags folder). Once you’ve found the id of the tag folder you are interested in create a new bookmark and enter the following for it’s location:

place:folder=ID&queryType=1&group=3&sort=4&applyOptionsToContainers=1&maxResults=15

Where you should replace ‘ID’ by the id of the folder for the tag in question. This will then create a smart folder that will display the 15 bookmarks that were most recently visited with the tag in question. You can investigate other options and work out other nifty queries to try using this post from the mozillazine forums. In partcular if you chage the sort from 4 to 12 it will instead list the 15 most recently bookmarked pages with the given tag.

Note that I found that I had to restart minefield in order for it to recognize any changes in the querystring. The list itself with update as you add new bookmarks with the appropriate tag but if you decide that it should display only the 10 most recent rather than 15 you may have to restart your browser for it to recognize the change.